Review: 'Malibu Country' with Reba McEntire is a gentle sitcom

Review: 'Malibu Country' with Reba McEntire is a gentle sitcom

'Malibu Country' on ABC stars Reba McEntire as a mom who moves her kids west from Nashville and wants to be a singer. There are California jokes. It's harmless.

Reba McEntire, who spent five seasons on the WB and one on the CW in a sitcom that bore her name, returns to television Friday in ABC's "Malibu Country," the fall season's second country-music-related network series, after "Nashville." (Also on ABC.) Slotted next to Tim Allen's "Last Man Standing," with which it shares an executive producer, "Reba" vet Kevin Abbott (who also wrote the pilot), it suggests a slight return of TGIF, the family-friendly sitcom block that expressed the network's theory of Friday-night programming all through the 1990s.